Perhaps this goes without saying, but the title is misleading. The Grand Jury did not indict Mr. Swartz on any copyright infringement or acts of piracy on the high seas. There are really only four indictments: wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information form a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer.

No, but he did chair the committee that authorized funding for the creation of what became the internet

...and as a result has been universally taunted and mocked by ignorant Republicans, not a one of whom at the time had even the slightest clue what the internet was, let alone what it could potentially become.

why 1776? her quote was something along the lines of "we haven't won yet, we can't party like it's 1773". My first thought was "what year did the revolutionary war end? 1783, I think she just missed it by a decade. that she is stupid nad the liberal commentators are equally stupid isn't very heartening. nor does it matter all that much.

and didn't she attempt to imply that by being able to see russia from a random island in alaska gave her foreign policy credentials? When bush was coming from texas, he

Good lord, where exactly is this evidence that it's unconstitutional? The fact that you don't like it isn't exactly a constitutional argument. Also, Thomas Drake was acquitted, and citing someone guilty of treason and a grown woman who convinced a teenage girl to kill herself as your "defense" isn't really as convincing as you seem to think it is.

its like having a law that says 'its illegal to bad things on a computer'. what the hell does that even mean? its complete bullshit, which is proved by the wide variety of people that have been prosecuted under it.

Drake was not acquitted, he plead guilty to one misdemeanor under the CFAA (instead of 5 felonies under the Espionage Act) - the point of his case is that the CFAA made it criminal to simply take unclassified information and have it in your house. UNCLASSIFIED.

now the CFAA applies to women telling people to commit suicide? AND to a guy who downloads from JSTOR? And to a guy who jailbreaks his playstation? What the fuck kind of a law is that?

I don't understand why computer laws are so hard. My computer is my property, as is the data stored on it. Accessing that data without my permission is trespassing. Destroying data is destruction of private property. Running software on it without my permission is conversion. Using my computer to lie to me to get my money is fraud. Threatening to delete my files unless I buy your software is blackmail. Sending threatening messages to me is assault.

Why is this so freaking hard!? We don't need laws specifically for computers or any other piece of technology, what we need is for politicians and justices to understand the fundamental concept that data is property and a computer is the just the physical (and arguably, least important) part of the system.

Data is owned. You're making the classic mistake of thinking about the law in engineering/mathematical terms - don't worry, we (us nerds) do this all the time, so you're in good company. The mathematical argument of "if I set a random number generator I could come up with the AACS encryption key/Britney Spears song/child porn" doesn't hold much water in a court.

The analogy of data-as-property is much closer to how (most) data exists, and is used. A digital photo is closely analogous to a film photo, except

That's not the point. The point is that data that is privately held and selectively distributed is just as much the property of the distributor as a car that is loaned out. I absolutely agree with you that research should be public, but "it would be better off free!" is not a justification for taking away that ownership by force. If you believe in fairness, the person who takes that control away should be punished in the same fashion as the person who steals my bank account information off of my computer, o

I absolutely agree with you that research should be public, but "it would be better off free!" is not a justification for taking away that ownership by force.

That betrays a false assumption often made by Internet libertarian types. The default is not to have protected property - the default is for stuff to merely exist and for it to end up with whoever is strongest and wants to have it. Any more sophisticated notion of ownership requires force to protect. To argue that it's only "force" when someone takes something from you but not "force" when the police stop someone else from taking something is deliberately redefining "force" to suit your viewpoint.

"Our current notions of property exist because they benefit enough of society that people have approved the appropriate force required to enforce those notions."

For more on that theme, see: "The Mythology of Wealth"http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402 [conceptualguerilla.com] "... The first thing they teach you in law school -- and I mean the first thing-- is that "property" is a collection of legal rights. They are mental abstractions. They were created in more or less their present form in the

It can't be hacking if no hacking was necessary. Using a computer interface on a network, as intended, to do something that someone only slightly didn't want, but allowed, doesn't really feel like a computer crime to me.

I burned all my mod points yesterday. Please +5 this post. It is the most insightful thing I've seen in a while.

Off-topic, but the same also applies to drug laws. We do not need a whole slew of laws to deal with the problems that come from drug abuse. Someone who is high beats someone up? Charge them with assault. They steal from you to finance their drug habit. Charge them with theft. They're high and they crash into someone, driving under the influence. That person dies? Manslaughter (or worse).

I don't understand why computer laws are so hard. My computer is my property, as is the data stored on it. Accessing that data without my permission is trespassing.

You're right, it's your property. And unfortunately, because your data exists in abstract space, the government can't rightfully claim eminent domain; that means that your computer is the gateway to the sovereign nation of Yourstuff. However, the government has no treaties with Yourstuff and knows that several other sovereign nations of similar creeds and colors consort with criminals. However, because there are so ungodly many sovereign nations of Hisstuff and Herstuff, the nation can't possibly have in

It's unconstitutionally vague, because courts are completely unsure how to draw the line between which ToS violations are criminal and which are not.

A non-vague possibility would be that all ToS violations are a federal "hacking" crime. For example, evading a Slashdot ban might be a felony. But few courts seem to want to do that. So which ToS are enforceable and which aren't?

Let's say that I'm on a university network without breaking into it (which I am). If I slurp 4 million JSTOR documents, this is clearly a violation of JSTOR's terms of service. But I have not in any meaningful way "hacked into" JSTOR; I accessed it from my university network, which I had legitimate access to. Yet it appears, under the theory advanced here, that I would be guilty of a federal crime, "stealing" 4 million documents from JSTOR, because my access went above the use JSTOR authorized me to make of their service, and therefore constitutes computer trespassing.

Of course since TOS can be changed often at and time and with little to no notice...

There really aught to be a good set of rules as to what shrink-wrap and click-through documents can get an individual to agree to and what they cannot. A good standardized outline of what is required to give consent online and having greater requirements for items of greater importance.

what market protections did gramm leach bliley remove? preventing 2 companies from merging was hardly our issue in this last run up. Citi failed because the bank invested it's excess cash in bad securities. I'm not sure how not having an insurance arm would have changed that. And the existence of AIG, Fannie, Freddie, Lehman, ML, Bear, etc would have been completely legal before the act as well.

Proprietary trading restrictions. Commodity prices across the board trending up 300%+ since early 2000's. Look at (m)any 20 year commodity graphs. It's curious global/political/natural 'disruptions' as well as China's voracious appetite were not as volatile prior to '99. Sure the dollar is weak, very much so, but is it 1/3 or 1/4 the value it was 10 years ago?

False. Copyright infringement is ANY copying or distribution for which you do not have permission. And before someone else mentions fair use: Fair use is a legal defense after the owner goes after you.

You may not agree with the current state of copyright law, but you should at least know it before making false claims about it.

The "too many library books" thing is a little disingenuous; I wonder whether JSTOR's servers were capable of keeping up with this kind of assault (assuming the factual description of this event is correct). On the other hand, this looks like government deciding to throw the books at this guy because they don't like his organization, and are using this as a pretext.

According to the indictment, he didn't manage to overwhelm JSTOR until he hooked up a Mac too.

The next day, October 9, 2010, Swartz used both the “ghost laptop” and the “ghost macbook” to systematically and rapidly access and download an extraordinary volume of articles from JSTOR. The pace was so fast that it brought down some of JSTOR’s computer servers.

Perhaps the Acer didn't have gigabit ethernet like the Mac does. That comes in handy when you break into the wiring closet and connect directly to the switch.

Read the indictment itself. IF the indictment is factually correct, Aaron's method of acquiring the articles included stashing a laptop in a wire closet directly connected to a switch. IF the indictment is factually correct, he did more than merely violate a EULA. He went well out of his way to get copies of these articles--at various times causing the JSTOR service to be unavailable to everyone else on MIT's network because the servers were busy trying to meet all the requests from Aaron's laptop.

That's not the definition lawyers use. Or rather--that probably is the definition that lawyers use, but they define "property" in such a way that copying any artistic or technical work that's in a fixed form (including electronically stored movies, songs, and computer programs) does count as "taking" the property without permission.

Now you can disagree with that definition if you want. That's fine. I'm not saying that I necessarily agree with that definition either. But the concept of copyright(literal

Copyright law does not grant the right to copy. It restricts your natural right to copy. Copying is not property, and copying can not be taken away from the author. Inherent in taking something away from the victim is that they no longer have it.

How in any way did you read my statement that copying is not theft to mean that copyright infringement is not civilly actionable and occasionally a crime? My problem is with the god damn corruption of the English language.

"Aaron Swartz, a 24-year-old researcher in Harvard University's Center for Ethics, broke into a locked computer-wiring closet in an MIT basement and used a switch there to gain unauthorized access the college's network,"

How ethical.

"Members of Demand Progress, a nonprofit political action group Swartz founded, criticized the indictment."

Well, it is if they were hoarding data that should be public, say. That's dubious in this case, but could be how Aaron saw it at the time In any case, JSTOR explicitly requested that charges not be pressed and the feds are doing so anyway like dicks, likely because in later life Aaron went on to do terribly inconvenient pro-liberty lobbying of the government.

so we spent our first 130 years of history without any dynamic changes (you know, before income tax)? It must have been.

I also hope you know that the top 0.1% and the top 10% pay more of the total federal income tax burden today than they did in your heyday of 91% marginal tax rates. So if anything, we have increased the progressiveness. (here is the current breakdown: http://ntu.org/tax-basics/who-pays-income-taxes.html [ntu.org]). Hell, the top 1% pay more now than they did in 2000 with higher capital gains tax

The figures you cite are just for federal personal income tax and ignore the disappearance of corporate taxes as well as the rise in regressive taxes related to sales, social security, medicare, and housing. They also ignore that we have the largest rich/poor wealth disparity than in any time since the run up to the last great depression.

"I'm not sure about others, but in my small group I work with, I know many, many people would walk away from the job if the top rates went back to 91%."

yes, because joe plumber can become a doctor? can become a lawyer? can become larry page?

the naivety of your view can be astounding, though I'm sure you were joking. others can't take those jobs because they are incapable. if they were capable, they would be hired as trainees (go to medical school, law school, etc). most aren't. It also ignores the fact that most top earners work longer hours in a year that most people do in 2-3 years. I know my current boss easily works 15 hour days during the week an

Seriously. JSTOR is non-profit in the same way IKEA is non-profit. I use JSTOR a lot because I have to, but I really wish someone else had been first to the table on the 'scan and OCR back-issues of journals' game.

Regardless of whether the tale in the indictment is true or not, it seems a weird way to go about just getting a whole bunch of jstor articles...

The defendant's record suggests a reasonable amount of tech savvy and some geek and activist cred. Combined, perhaps, with a little beer money, that should be enough to secure the cooperation of a few students at a great many of the colleges that have site licenses for jstor journals. Within trivial driving/MBTA distance of MIT alone, there are quite a few to choose from.

It seems like you could get entirely the same results, entirely above board, just by scraping a little more slowly, from slightly more endpoints, which would be easy to secure with the permission of their owners. While MIT is fairly laid back, cloak-and-daggering into their wiring closets risks the wrath of some resident BOFH, and it isn't legal. Mere scraping, on the other hand, is just a ToS violation at worst.

If he was crashing servers, his rate-limiting was probably a little on the lax side, which is presumably didn't want directly associated with his account; but that still doesn't explain why he wouldn't just go with the distributed approach, along with a dash of patience.

Quite possibly so. I just find the study of idiots and idiocy to be quite interesting(and, given their numbers and the fact that situational idiocy can crop up in basically anybody, also quite important).

Thus, even if true, "He was an idiot." is really just the start of the exploration.

only thing i can think of is to avoid having this actual name attached to it..

but i do find odd is that it took so long for the sysadmins to stop him.. sorry but hiding it under a cardboard box and coming back and swapping drives.

if it was transferring enough data for the admins to take notice and to "block the ip" they should have recognized it was an internal IP and found it physically.. follow the traffic to the switch and follow the cable..

jesus christ, have you ever had your shit auto-filled in by facebook? do you remember authorizing that shit?

this whole thing is an assault on the intelligence of the public. it is absolutely outrageous abuse of power. the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is being rolled up like a stick and used as a battering ram against the First Amendment. this administration is completely out of control.

This isn't the first time Swartz has spidered a site in order to download the content hosted there. In 2009, he went after the PACER system which hosts court records. While those are public documents, they're behind a per-page paywall. His python script was probably reused from before, just s/pacer.gov/jstor.org/g. See: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/swartz-fbi/ [wired.com]

When you're the creator of the Open Library project, liberating a few million articles from behind a rather expensive paywall is, at t

He wasn't as well known as he wanted, so the best way to solve that is to do something to get arrested. Really, I don't know who this guy is and I don't care.

And I'm frankly tired of the overblown hysteria about government conspiracies trying to shut up tiny blogs. This has nothing to do with politics: they'll pile on all the charges that they can think of onto anyone they arrest, the shotgun approach is a very common approach. Ie, tack on larger and lesser charges, this way you have a higher chance of a

... and it seems like once you start downloading too much it kicks you off or makes you contact someone.Seems like he evaded that little scheme and they're charging him with that.Insane... it'd be like charging someone for disabling pop-ups.

I was under the(apparently mistaken) impression that that ugly little notion had been settled:

Back during that 'myspace suicide case' drama, the prosecution made the argument that, by creating an account under a false name(which the defendant definitely had), she had violated the myspace terms of service(which, she also definitely had); but then went on to claim that accessing a website in a way contrary to the ToS was a violation of the CFAA. Thankfully, that... exceptionally broad... interpretation was shot down.

Whatever he was doing in a locked wiring closet may well have been some sort of trespassing; but ToS violations are a matter between you and the entity(and generally only worth terminating your relationship) not you and the feds.

Who cares what MIT or JSTOR thinks. This is criminal matter not a civil one. If they don't want to sue then that is their deal. The govement has a responcibility to its citizens to enforce the laws equally. If I broke into a closet at MIT I would get jail time even if I was just stealing soap.

No. Police don't arrest someone every time a crime appears to have been committed, nor do prosecutors prosecute every person arrested for a crime. They have discretion, and limited resources, and more apparent crimes than they can afford to investigate or prosecute. If the crime appears to be minor, and the victim doesn't want to press charges, or there's no victim, the police are likely to ignore it. What prosecutors actually prosecute is a policy decision -- which often means, a political decision.

What prosecutors actually prosecute is a policy decision -- which often means, a political decision.

Or, if you believe the old man Occam, it often is a matter of convenience. Prosecutors need convictions. It's hard to get a conviction in case when one gangbanger assaulted another gangbanger and 100 witnesses "haven't seen a thing." But it's trivial to get conviction on mere technical grounds, and a "hacker case" may have more public visibility than a common assault. If the prosecutor has the goods on thi

The fact that MIT of all places couldn't figure out which switch an IP address/Mac Address was hitting them from, within their own network, speaks volumes about the quality of the IT staff working there. I can think of dozens of different ways I could have stopped him right off the top of my head, and tracking down the location of the computer would have been even easier unless he had plugged in a wireless bridge or something. EVEN THEN, finding it wouldn't have been that hard.

that Obama personally appointed Lanny Breuer, who is in charge of alot of these 'leak' cases.

And as commander of the armed forces, he is directly responsible for the fate of Bradley Manning.

i dont know who is involved in the Swartz case... so maybe i am crazy on that one.

But the argument that the president has nothing to do with federal prosecutions is a bit off the mark. He sets the tone and sets the priorities, he hires people, knowing their records, and he also allows people to stay in their jobs (like W

I don't know about you but I'm pretty sure that the President of the United States does not have a hand in every prosecution case. Also what offense can you cite that the President has committed that would warrant impeachment? Calling for impeachment just becaue you don't like who was prosecuted doesn't mean the President committed an impeachable offense.

We can't comb the evidence because he apparently never got to the point of sharing the blob of articles on the pirate bay. Seems pretty clear-cut to me: He is an ethics researcher, got it into his head that it is unethical for journals to have restricted archives, and was doing his best to liberate as many archives as he had access to.

I wonder if JSTOR, through MIT, was his first target. I mean, how many universities are there in Boston? And somebody check arXiv.org; see if there's been an influx of su

Anti-Wikileaks? I don't believe so. The motivation is access for all. Currently, documents in JSTOR cannot be freely accessed by those without memberships. Pirating the JSTOR repository changes that. When Wikileaks makes information public, they are trying to shed light on the organization that produced the information. If these JSTOR documents were shared, it would be so the knowledge itself may be used, without any judgement of the authors. (When I read a leaked cable, I care not for the cable's co

they had no authorization to engage in massive copyright violation, scanning millions of copyrighted books that they had no right to, specifically violating the exact same laws that drove Kinko's to lose massive amount of university campus business in the 1980s.

and yet.

Google got away with it. Google books is there for all to see. journals, advertisements, the books, the newspapers, the articles, all copyrighted, all obtained by google without permission.